Privacy Policy

SWELL collects customer information to improve your overall shopping experience. We respect your privacy and are committed to maintaining and using this information responsibly. Except as otherwise mentioned below, this privacy policy only addresses the use and disclosure of information we collect from you on our website. By visiting SWELL.com you are accepting the practices described in this privacy policy.

Overview Our site allows you to buy products and services, sign up for a gift registry, enter contests, receive special discounts, apply for credit, fill out surveys, and receive newsletters, e-mails or other promotional information from us. We use the information that we collect about you to fulfill your product and service purchases and to create a more personalized online experience. This is just a brief overview, so please read on for more details about our Privacy Policy. This Policy may change from time to time, so please check back periodically.

Except as otherwise discussed in this Privacy Policy, this document only addresses the use and disclosure of information we collect from you online. For some services, we either collect and transfer personal information to a service provider you have selected, or you may visit other merchants through links on our site who may collect and use your personal information. We encourage you to ask questions and to be very cautious before you disclose your personal information to others.

Questions regarding this Policy should be directed to customerservice@swell.com, or may also be contacted directly at the following address:

This Privacy Policy will explain the following regarding use of our site:

What information does SWELL collect from you?

Where do we collect information from you and how do we use it?

Who is collecting your information?

With whom do we share your information?

How can you update or correct your Personally Identifiable Information?

What are your choices regarding collection, use, and distribution of your information?

What security precautions are in place to protect against the loss, misuse, or alteration of your information?

A special note about children's privacy

SWELL and third-party use of "cookies" and "action tags"

You should carefully review privacy policies of any third party sites accessible from SWELL

Contacting SWELL about privacy questions or concerns

Privacy Policy changes

1. What information does SWELL collect from you?

In order to better provide you with numerous products and services, SWELL collects two types of information about its visitors: Personally Identifiable Information and Non-Personally Identifiable Information. Our primary goal in collecting information from you is to provide you with a smooth, efficient, and customized experience while using our site.

Personally Identifiable Information: This refers to information that lets us know the specifics of who you are. Personal information is requested when you order a product or service, register for a Gift List, enter contests or sweepstakes, fill out surveys, and send us feedback. For example, this information might include your name, billing address, shipping address, telephone number, e-mail address, credit card or other payment information, and product details. With this information, SWELL can fill your orders and better provide you with personalized services. For a few services, we may collect your personal information on behalf of other merchants and share it with them.

Non-Personally Identifiable Information: This refers to information that does not by itself identify a specific individual. We gather certain information about you based upon where you shop on our site in several ways. This information is compiled and analyzed on both a personal and an aggregated basis. For example, this information may include the Web site's Uniform Resource Locator ("URL") that you just came from, which URL you next go to, what browser you are using, and your Internet Protocol ("IP") address. A URL is the global address of documents and other resources on the World Wide Web. An IP address is an identifier for a computer or device on a Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol ("TCP/IP") network, such as the World Wide Web. Networks like the Web use the TCP/IP protocol to route information based on the IP address of the destination. In other words, an IP address is a number that is automatically assigned to your computer whenever you are surfing the web, allowing webservers to locate and identify your computer. Computers require IP addresses in order for users to communicate on the Internet, browse and shop.

2. Where do we collect information from you and how do we use it?

Our primary goal in collecting personal information is to provide SWELL's visitors with a superior customized online experience. We use the customer contact information to fill orders, contact purchasers to inform them of their order status, to send promotional information, to enhance the operation of our site and administer our systems.

Demographic data also may be collected at our site from third party advertising servers, content servers, or web site analysis agents who provide us with the zip code and area code associated with a visitor's server, along with pages viewed on our site. We review the actions of the SWELL visitors on an aggregate basis to determine customers' preferences. SWELL also does research on our visitors' demographics, interests, and pages viewed based on the information provided to us during ordering, a promotion, from our server log files, from our web site analysis agents, or from contests, drawings or surveys. We will use this data to tailor the visitor's experience at our site, to improve our marketing and promotional efforts, to statistically analyze site use, to improve our product offerings, and to customize our site's content, layout, and services. We receive reports from third party ad servers, content servers, or web site analysis agents that tell us how many ads were presented and clicked upon or what content was served or viewed.

We may also share your personally identifiable information with third parties who provide services to us, our customers and web site visitors. Those third parties include authorized contractors, temporary employees and consultants and other companies, where we believe it to be appropriate (in our sole discretion).

We gather information in the following ways:

Shopping: We collect IP addresses for the purposes of system administration, to gather broad demographic information, to enable ads to be served on our site, to report Non-Personally Identifiable Information to our advertisers, and to monitor the level of activity on our site. We collect information from visitors to our site regarding the URLs they came from, domain types (e.g., .com or .org), their IP addresses, the date and time of their visit or order, the number of visits and orders, the number of visits per browsing session, the server type, the operating system and browser type used to come to the site, the country, state and telephone area code where their servers are located, the pages and page titles of our site that visitors viewed during their visit, whether the visitor's computer is enabled for Java or cookies, browser language, applications and plug-ins, and any search terms entered on our site.

Ordering: When you order from us, we collect personally identifiable information from you. If you order one of our products or services, we will collect and maintain your name, e-mail address, billing address, shipping address, telephone number, product selections, credit card, order number, referring URL, IP address, page you bought from and a password. We collect this, and other information, as disclosed in this Policy, in order to fill your order, to communicate with you about your order and to send you promotional materials. Before confirming your order, you will have the opportunity to review the product order form and make changes and additions to the information it contained and these changes will be automatically kept for future use.

Wish List: If you decide to create a Wish List through our site, you will create an account, where we will collect and use your name, e-mail address and product preferences. This information is subject to the terms of this Privacy Policy except as explained here. Others will be able to search for your Wish List using your e-mail address unless you choose not to make your Wish List searchable. Those who have access to your Wish List will be able to see your name, e-mail address, city, state, and may have access to other personal information and product information that you have entered into the Wish List. If others place orders for items on your Wish List, they may have access to your address. We will use the product preferences that you include in your Wish List to inform you about offers that may be of interest to you.

Gift Certificates: If you purchase a gift certificate from our site you will give us the name, mailing information and phone number for the recipient. The Gift Certificate will be sent to the recipient via standard mail. The recipient information you give us will only be used to send the gift certificate and for no other purpose.

Online Surveys and Polling: In order to improve our services to you, we ask some of our customers to voluntarily complete surveys, which may be collected by an independent third party. Individual survey answers are confidential, although Non-Personally Identifiable Information is collected and disclosed to third parties. If you do not wish to participate in a survey, simply decline to participate when asked.

Contests and Sweepstakes: When you enter a contest or other promotion, we may ask you for contact information such as your name, address and e-mail address in order to administer the contest, to send you promotional emails, notify winners and make the winners' list publicly available pursuant to certain states' laws. Your consent to such promotional use and disclosure of this information as a condition of your participation.

Newsletters and Promotional E-mails: We offer such as our SWELL catalog, and promotional e-mails as a service to our customers. We will send you catalogs and e-mails periodically listing current specials and deals. To stop receiving, send an e-mail to us at customerservice@swell.com.

Contact Information and Third Party Data: If you contact SWELL or our customer service representatives by telephone, e-mail or letter, we may keep a record of your correspondence or comments. If you contact us through our feedback area or by calling one of our customer service representatives, we may ask for your name, e-mail address and order information in order to send you a reply.

Affiliate Program: Our Affiliate Program (Affiliate Connection) is administered by a third party, on a third party's Web site. Any information collected by them is not governed by this Policy.

Cookies: We use cookies and may allow others to use cookies in the operation of our site.

3. Who is collecting your information?

Ad Servers and Content Servers: We may use third party ad servers or content servers to serve ads, product information, or other information both on and off our site. Those third parties may use "action tags" or web beacons throughout the site to count the number of visitors who click on a banner ad or other information and to track the number of customers who continue on to make a purchase. They may also place their own "cookie" on your computer to help those ads to run and analyze site usage. We do not provide them with any of your Personally Identifiable Information. For more information about the information they collect, please see the section "Use of Cookies and Action Tags" below.

Image Servers: We use a third party image serving company to serve the graphics that visitors see on our site more quickly. They collect a visitor's IP address and the URLs of any graphics viewed and the date and time of the visit. However, they do not collect and we do not provide them with any Personally Identifiable Information. They may also use a "cookie."

E-mail Services: We use a third party to send promotional e-mails to customers. Images contained in the email may be served by the third party. They collect certain information about you such as your IP address, browser type, your operating system, the country and server your computer is logged onto, where the servers that your computer is logged onto is located, the time and date that a particular email was viewed, the area code and zip code associated with your server, and whether you responded to a particular ad or email, products viewed and whether you continued on to make a purchase. They may use a "cookie" or "action tags."

Website Analysis Agent: We may contract with several online partners to help manage and optimize our Internet business and marketing. We use the services of marketing companies to help us measure the effectiveness of our advertising and how visitors use our site. To do this, we use Action Tags and cookies provided by the marketing companies on this site. The type of information we collect includes things such as pages, information and advertisements viewed as well as what items are placed in a shopping basket or purchased, the order number, the amount of a purchase, the product number and the quantity purchased. By supplementing our records, this information helps us learn things like what kinds of customers our site attracts, which of our products most interest our customers, and what kinds of offers our customers like to see. Although the marketing companies log the information coming from our site on our behalf, we control how that data may and may not be used. For more information, please see the section "Use of Cookies and Action Tags" below.

Links and Banner Ads to Third-Party Sites: Please be aware that our site may contain links to other sites on the Internet that are owned and operated by third parties. The information practices of those websites linking from or to our site are not covered by this Policy. These other sites may send their own cookies to users, collect data, or solicit personal information. Additionally, other companies or ad servers, which place advertising on our site may collect information about you through the use of cookies when you view or click on their advertising. We cannot control this collection of information. You should contact advertisers directly if you have any questions about their use of the information that they collect.

4. With whom do we share your information?

Fulfillment: The information collected by SWELL is used for processing orders, keeping you informed about your order status, for statistical purposes, for improving our site and its performance, to serve ads, and to notify you of products or special offers that may be of interest to you. We will disclose your Personally Identifiable Information to third parties to charge your credit card, fill your order, deliver your order, provide customer service, provide you with credit and deliver promotional e-mails to you from SWELL. For example, we must release your credit card information to the card-issuing bank to confirm payment; and release your address and telephone information to the delivery service to deliver products that you ordered. In addition we retain the right to share your Personally Identifiable Information with third parties at our sole discretion. You can always contact us in order to have us suppress your Personally Identifiable Information from our systems by e-mailing us at customerservice@swell.com then we will not share your Personally Identifiable Information with Other third parties, except as under the section "Compliance with Service of Process or Law Enforcement" below or to protect the rights of SWELL, its suppliers and/or its customers. Please allow 90 days to process the change, and you acknowledge that most of the services provided on our site will not be available.

Non-Personally Identifiable Information: We may provide Non-Personally Identifiable Information about our customers' sales, traffic patterns, and related site information to third parties, but these statistics do not include any Personally Identifiable Information.

Services Provided on Our Site: Except as otherwise stated in this Policy, without your consent, SWELL does not disclose its customers' Personally Identifiable Information to other merchants. Where you sign up for goods or services offered through our site, but sold directly to you by a third party, we give your personal information to that third party.

Data Analysis Agents: The information collected by or for SWELL may be provided to an outside company for the purpose of analysis. That analysis is to help us to improve our site and product selection, and to notify you of special offers that may be of interest to you. That data analysis agent may not share any Personally Identifiable Information with others, or use it for any other purpose than to help SWELL.

Ad Servers, Advertisers, Image Servers and Website Analysis Agents: These third parties use their cookies' identification numbers and internal web site tracking features to serve ads on our site and to collect aggregated information to create statistics about our customers and visitors, traffic patterns, and related site information. In the event that our ad servers collect any Personally Identifiable Information on our behalf, it will not be used by them or disclosed to any third parties.

Compliance with Service of Process or Law Enforcement: Occasionally SWELL may be asked by law enforcement or judicial authorities to provide Personally Identifiable Information to the appropriate governmental authorities. We will disclose Personally Identifiable Information upon receipt of a court order, subpoena, or to cooperate with a law enforcement investigation, without prior notice to you. SWELL fully cooperates with law enforcement agencies in identifying those who use our services for illegal activities. We reserve the right to report to law enforcement agencies any activities that we believe to be unlawful.

Sweepstakes and Drawings: Where you enter a sweepstakes, drawing or other promotion, we may provide entry information, including name, address, email address and age to the company providing the prize or sponsoring the promotion. They may use your Personally Identifiable Information to send you marketing or promotional materials or other communications.

5. How can you update or correct your Personally Identifiable Information?

We believe you should have the ability to access and edit the personal information that you have provided to us. During the online ordering process you can review, change, or delete the information that you have submitted. You may change any of your personal information in your account online at any time. We encourage you to promptly update your information if it changes. You may ask to have the information on your account deleted or removed; however, because we keep track of past purchases, you cannot delete information associated with past purchases. Also, as a security measure we "back up" the data stored on our systems, and such prior information cannot be completely removed from our databases. As a result, you should not expect that all of your Personally Identifiable Information will be completely removed from our backed-up databases.

6. What are your choices regarding collection, use, and distribution of your information?

Email: We may from time to time send you e-mail or other communications regarding current promotions, specials and new additions to the SWELL site. You may "opt-out," or unsubscribe from our newsletters by following the unsubscribe instructions in any e-mail you receive from us. After doing so, SWELL users will not receive future promotional emails unless they open a new account, enter a contest, or sign up to receive newsletters or emails.

Ad-servers and Other Content Servers: You may also set your browser so that it will not accept "cookies" to prevent assignment from the ad server of a unique identifier; however, you will be unable to shop on our site if you do so.

7. What security precautions are in place to protect against the loss, misuse, or alteration of your information?

In order to most efficiently serve you, credit card transactions and order fulfillment are handled by established third party banking, processing agents and distribution institutions. They receive the information needed to verify and authorize your credit card or other payment information and to process and ship your order. When you access your account information, the information is kept on a secure server. All of the customer data we collect is protected against unauthorized access by physical security means.

8. A special note about children's privacy

You must be at least 13 years old to have our permission to use this site. Our policy is that we do not knowingly collect, use or disclose Personally Identifiable Information about visitors under 13 years of age. If you are the parent or guardian of a minor under 13 years of age and believe that they have disclosed personally identifiable information to us, please contact us at customerservice@swell.com.

9. SWELL and third-party use of "cookies" and "action tags."

SWELL Cookies: When you use our site we will store cookies on your computer in order to facilitate and customize your use of our site. A cookie is a small data text file, which a Web site stores on your computer's hard drive (if your Web browser permits) that can later be retrieved to identify you to SWELL. Our cookies store randomly assigned user identification numbers, the country where you are located, and your first name to welcome you back to our site. The cookies make your use of the site easier, allow you to retrieve an earlier shopping cart, make the site run more smoothly and help us to maintain a secure site. You will be unable to shop on our site without your browser set to accept cookies.

Ad Server and Content Server Cookies: We may use an outside ad serving company or content server to display banner advertisements and other information on our site or to serve promotional emails. As part of their service, they place a separate cookie on your computer. Except for the company that serves our promotional emails, SWELL does not provide third-party ad servers with any of your Personally Identifiable Information. SWELL and its third party ad servers do collect and use Non-Personally Identifiable Information about you, such as your IP address, browser type, the URLs from which you came, referring site's domain types (e.g., .com), operating system, the country, the server your computer is logged onto, where the servers that your computer is logged onto is located, the pages of our site and products that visitors viewed during their visit, where an ad was placed on a specific web site page, the time and date particular ads were served, the area code and zip code associated with your server and whether you responded to a particular ad, and a receipt identifier.

Our third-party ad servers will occasionally use outside agents, whose computers will serve ads on our site in the same manner and under the same conditions as above. In addition, other ad serving companies or advertisers may place banner ads on our site in the same manner as above, but we do not disclose to them any Personally Identifiable Information.

Image Server Cookies: As part of the ad-serving process, a third party may serve graphics upon our site. In order to customize their service, they may also place a cookie upon your computer. While SWELL does not control their use of that cookie, no Personally Identifiable or individual customers' product information is collected.

Website Analysis Agent Cookies: We may use a third party to analyze what our visitors find to be most interesting on our site. To do that, they will place a cookie on your computer with a randomly assigned unique number in order to track the pages you view on our site, along with other Non-Personally Identifiable Information.

Action Tags, Web Beacons and other Data Collection Methods: An action tag or a web-beacon (also known as a clear gif or a pixel tag) is a method used to track responses or actions by customers who view certain advertisements or other information on our site. Action tags are 1x1 pixel images embedded in a website page that are used to transparently collect information. Our ad server, content servers and website analysis agents may use action tags to count the number of times that visitors click on a particular banner ad or visit the pages of our site and to provide information about what products are viewed or purchased. Without collecting any personally identifiable information, they use that data to tell us (and other advertisers) which ads are the most effective on particular sites. Our ad server, content server and website analysis agents may use an action tag on our basket page, checkout page, and other pages, to keep anonymous track of the number of times that clicking on a banner ad or views other information on our site results in a purchase. They also collect the amount of the purchase, order confirmation number, stock keeping unit number, quantity and identity of product purchased.

E-mail Distributor's Use of Action Tags: Our third-party e-mail distributor may also use action tags. They may, for example, keep track of when a promotional e-mail is opened and provide SWELL with ongoing aggregated reports of how many customers have responded. We share with them web site usage information about visitors to our web site who have received a promotional e-mail or other targeted promotional campaign. They use the information for the purpose of targeting future campaigns and upgrading visitor information used in reporting statistics. For this purpose, we and our third-party e-mail distributor note some of the pages you visit on our web site through the use of action tags.

10. You should carefully review privacy policies of any third party sites accessible from SWELL

Other sites accessible through our web site have their own privacy policies and data collection, use and disclosure practices. Please consult each site's privacy policy. SWELL is not responsible for the policies or practices of third parties. Please be aware that this site may contain links to other sites on the Internet that are owned and operated by third parties. The information practices of those web sites linked to SWELL are not covered by this Privacy Policy. These other sites may send their own cookies to users, collect data, or solicit personal information. Additionally, other companies that place advertising on our site may collect information about you when you view or click on their advertising through the use of cookies. We cannot control this collection of information. You should contact these advertisers directly if you have any questions about their use of the information that they collect.

On behalf of various sponsors, SWELL provides sponsored links to third-party web sites. If you click on a sponsored link or banner ad, a "window" or "frame" containing a third-party's web site may appear in the foreground with the SWELL web site in the background. Unless you are on SWELL's web site, any time that you have moved to a window, you should assume that your personal information is being collected, used and disclosed in accordance with the windowed site's privacy policy (if any). If you are unsure as to whose privacy policy applies, please contact us by e-mail at SWELL.com, or by sending a letter to the address below.

11. Contacting SWELL about privacy questions or concerns

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, the practices of this site, or your dealings with this site, please contact SWELL by sending a letter to:

This Privacy Policy was last changed on February, 2006. If SWELL makes changes to any terms or conditions of the Privacy Policy, the changes will be posted in this document so that you will always know what information we gather, how we might use that information and to whom we will disclose it. We may change, modify, add or remove portions of this Policy at any time, and any changes will become effective immediately upon being posted unless we tell you otherwise.